I'm a native English teacher in a non-English speaking country and Practical English Usage has quickly become my go-to resource for researching grammatical issues. Browsing this easy-to-read grammar guide has also helped to inspire new topics for my ESL lessons. Written in plain English without extensive grammatical jargon, the book is an easy read and the organization makes it simple to browse any given topic. Specific words and phrases are indexed separately, so the reader can research a broad topic like adverb particles or find a specific phrase like "find out" in the index and read about it in an article on the word "know". I imagine Practical English Usage would also be extremely useful to an advanced student of English as a foreign or second language, though the organization and diversity of topics might overwhelm intermediate students.
As a guide to practical usage rather than rules of grammar, incorrect usages that have fallen into common use are typically described as "informal" rather than "incorrect"; likewise, the grammatically correct form is typically described as "formal" or "very formal English". This may annoy militant grammarians but should please writers and teachers less inclined to attack split infinitives or sentences ending with prepositions. (Those who wish to wage war over these usages will find ample rules of engagement, however.) Practical English Usage also includes practical topics such as the truncated grammar of newspaper headlines, the standard form of a business letter and even a brief mention of mobile texting conventions.
My two minor complaints: first, the avoidance of grammar jargon in the organization of the book can take some time to adapt to. For example, you won't find "transitive verb" or "intransitive verb" in the index, but you'll find those subjects in the "verb complementation" segment and related articles. Second, as a publication of Oxford University, the book sometimes feels a need to devote rather copious explanations to sentence structures and usages that are uncommon outside of British English. The book does an excellent job of noting distinctively British and American usages; readers may even be surprised to learn which phrases they use in everyday English are peculiar to their linguistic lineage. For an American reader such as myself, however, some of the structures discussed at great length seem fairly irrelevant outside of the dominion of the British crown. Nevertheless, this book is an invaluable resource for practical English and recommended to educators, learners and writers of all types.
I used an earlier edition of this book in China about fourteen years ago to learn English. Practical English Usage is written in such simple English that I was able to read and benefit from it with merely a lower-intermediate grasp of the language then. I found it encouraging as a language learner to be able to read and study the English language in English, parting with my native language for the first time. I remember that I was always able to find corresponding entries to words that I found difficult to differentiate. In short, I consider this book indispensable to learners of the English language.
The volume I used fifteen years has since followed me to Singapore and eventually to the United States. Although I, having developed proficiency in the language, no longer use the book, I still hold much respect for it. I have used quite a lot of ESL books and Swan's work easily falls into my top-three list.
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